There is a strong movement, maybe the dominant undercurrent ethos of science fiction, that science fiction (and I am talking strictly about science fiction and not fantasy) is not about the future, alternate present, alternate past or whenever it takes place in which it is set. Instead, the rosetta stone of much of science fiction is--what is this novel, story, work talking about in the modern day. What is it showing, through a mirror darkly (or sometimes very much obviously). Figure that out, and you can really dig into what an author is doing, intentionally or otherwise.
So with that in mind, let’s look at Lauren C. Teffeau’s A Hunger with No Name. We start off in a slowly decaying herding village of Astrava. Our main character, Thurava, is training with her mother to be a herder of the sheep (or perhaps llama-like) lucerva. This is a herding society where herders take their flocks to pastures and then return with them with the change of seasons back to their village to be shorn. We quickly learn this itself is a change, the herds used to be kept a lot closer, but the nearby river has dwindled in recent decades, and so cannot support the village and pastures both. We get a sense of diminishment, that the way of life of Thurava’s people is under slow constant squeeze.
There’s more, though. This is a post-apocalyptic society, one that grew up in the wake of a dominant and highly technological civilization that collapsed. Astrava and its peers are what came out of that fall.
And then there is the Glass City. A city of wonders, of technology, of very different ways of life. Of, perhaps, a return to the life before the apocalypse. The Glass City has sent an automation, a representative, to coax and convince people to give up the herder life and come to the City to find work and stability. Is it a false premise? An illusion? Those who have gone to the city have NOT sent messages back as to their life there. Not even Thurava’s best friend.
Given the attitudes and fear and apprehensions of life before that apocalypse, you’d think an automation from the Glass City urging to come to its home with the hope and promise of those beforetimes would be a nonstarter. However with their way of life diminishing year by year, the trickle of people heading to the big city and a new life becomes a flood, once that eventually drives Astrava to come to the Glass City, and find out for herself what is really happening, and what she can do about it.
I very deliberately used the word fable in the tag line of this review and I want to interrogate and explain why as the focus of this review. A Hunger with No Name is a science fiction novel but it is even more so a fable¹, right from the name which has that resonance to it. What is, in fact, the titular hunger with no name? It does get a personification in this book, as Thurava finds out as the dark secret (even to most residents) of the Glass City. That monstrous personification is what has been driving the city, and also its effects on its neighbors, including Astrava, for quite some time.
But again, why is this a science fiction fable? It’s a fable in the same way the movie Snowpiercer is a fable, or In Time. If you want a literary parallel, the closest thing I can think of that really sits in the same space as this novel are the stories in Stanslaw Lem’s The Cyberiad, which explicitly says they are “fables for the cybernetic age”. But this is a novel-length fable which does veer against the usual short length nature of the form. And Lem’s fables are written for humor to leaven his fables and messaging. The author, here, is most deadly serious in her fable.
But now as to the clincher as to why this story isn’t just a straight up science fiction novel. Our main character, Thurava, is engaged directly in the idea of gathering stories. She goes from herder of lucerva to herder of knowledge, of stories, of the culture of her people. Once she reaches the glass city and see what it is doing to her, to her people, her ambitions to preserve and transmit and keep the stories and culture of her people makes her, in effect, a storyteller, a transmitter of culture, knowledge, and the philosophy of her people, their way of life. Even more so than the aforementioned Lem, by grounding Thurava as a storyteller, and infusing her story with stories she learns, collects, tells.
But while Thurava is at first trying to be a preservationist, trying to preserve, the force of the story as she learns the truth of the Glass City, is to be spurred to eventual reluctant but decisive action against it, especially once that hunger’s nature, and its all consuming desire becomes clear. Once Thurava learns the truth of it, she has no choice but to take action against it. She is a reluctant protagonist, but when the truth of the fable that she is in becomes clear, the inevitability of her course of action plays out in the denouement of the book.
So what is this a fable of? It’s simple. The heart of the city and what Thurava finds there, as well as the societal and social structures around it, are a metaphor and a personification of rapacious and unrelenting late stage environment-destroying capitalism². It is literally a hunger with no name, and a bottomless hunger at that. The author gives it a form and a shape for Thurava to fight against and oppose. That too puts this in the realm of a science fiction fable. Opposing an entire societal structure that we live in is hard to handle (or even believe can be done, and especially not by one person). But giving the hunger with no name a form (and a name), Thurava can take decisive and destructive action against it.
But this is also more of a fable than a hard science fiction story in that it doesn’t take a hard look at the long term consequences of her actions and their aftermath. One could really see Astrava’s ultimate course of action in apocalyptic terms, and it does fundamentally change the way of life for the residents of the Glass City, and not at all for the better. Thurava’s course is a radical one, but in keeping with the fable frame, we are looking at it as a response to the personification of the problem that the aforementioned personification embodies.
Thurava’s story may not satisfy everyone, in the end. It may not satisfy you if you are not in a mood and mindset to receive it. It is a fable that will absolutely enrage a strand of readers who see the fable and its metaphors as a call to radical action. It’s not a comfortable story, by any means, but it takes time to get to that discomfort. Like the slow fade and fall of the Astrava, the novel takes its time but the eventual descent into the solution Thurava takes takes on the air of inevitability, but uncomfortable inevitability.
As mentioned before, most fables leaven humor into the story. Some do not. All, however, are made to ask and answer moral questions and sometimes pose answers. A Hunger with No Name asks a moral question and while it does not use humor, it uses the unflinching lens of the author to give an answer to it.
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Highlights:
- Strong science fictional and environmental message in a novel length fable form
- Excellent use of Thurava as a main character as storyteller and reluctant but decisive agent of change
POSTED BY: Paul Weimer. Ubiquitous in Shadow, but I’m just this guy, you know? @princejvstin.
¹There appears to be a difference between fables and parables that I can’t quite parse. Is this novel really a parable instead of a fable? I’m not sure, but the whole idea of a moral lesson or message is definitely on point here.
²There is also the possibility, given the nature of the automations and the works of the hunger with no name, that there is also a message against LLMs and generative AI at work here. That is less clear, and may be something the reader (me) brought to this fable.
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